Cassini Spacecraft Crashes into Saturn This Morning — Watch it live! Or Re-runs!

❝ Friday, Sept. 15, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will wrap up 20 historic years in space, collecting data as it crashes into Saturn’s atmosphere and burns up like a meteor…Today’s stories on Cassini’s demise…

NASA will air a series of webcasts leading up Cassini’s final suicide plunge, which you will be able to watch here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV…

❝ Friday, Sept. 15

❝ 7:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. EDT (1100 to 1230 GMT): Live commentary about end-of-mission activities. An uninterrupted camera feed from JPL Mission Control, with mission audio only, will also be available during the commentary…

❝ About 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT): Cassini’s last science data, and final signal, should come down to Earth.

❝ 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT): Post-mission news conference from JPL…

❝ The $3.2 billion Cassini-Huygens mission — a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency — launched in October 1997 and arrived in the Saturn system on June 30, 2004 (PDT)…

But nothing lasts forever. Cassini is nearly out of fuel; if it runs out completely, the probe’s handlers won’t be able to control it anymore. So they want to dispose of Cassini before things get to that point, which is why they’re sending the spacecraft on a death dive into Saturn on Sept. 15…

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